Tod Arthur Daniels, 82, a 50+ year resident of Seattle, died early Saturday morning in his sleep after a six-month battle with kidney disease, on December 1st, 2018. He spent his last days at the Park Ridge skilled nursing facility, where he was known for his cheese classes, biting wit and the unexpected sound of a bicycle horn from his walker.
He was preceded in death by his loving wife, Joanne Blake Daniels on March 27, 2018. Her passing was unexpected, and Tod’s final months ached with mourning her loss.
Tod was born on April 3rd, 1936 to Zelda Daniels (Ruple) and Erling (Bud) Daniels as the firstborn of two sons. He was delivered at the general hospital in Livingston, Montana, but when his parents took him home to Jardine, they stepped back a full generation into the past. This was a mining camp whose inhabitants used animals for power, grew their food, hunted and trapped for meat on the table and furs to sell.
When he reached school age, his family moved around a lot all over the Northwest from Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon. His father would come home and ask his mother to pack up the car, he’d told his boss to shove it. By the time Tod graduated from the eighth grade, he had attended 13 different schools! He earned his high school diploma from The Dalles, Oregon and went on to study drama at Portland State College.
After a couple of semesters there, he enlisted in the Air Force. After a battery of tests, his backwoods upbringing helped him earn a prized spot as a Survival Instructor, and a more secret position as part of a hand-picked unit charged with parachuting behind enemy lines to rescue downed pilots and airmen. It only recently came to light that he had also been trained to disarm and disable any nuclear bombs that might have survived the crash landing as well.
In 1961 he married his dear friend Joanne Daniels (Blake) and adopted her two children Heather Siobhan (Craig) and Christopher John. They decided to start their new family in Seattle, Washington and lived there for the rest of their lives.
Like many young men starting their families in Seattle in the early 1960s, we worked at the 1962 World’s Fair. It opened his and his young family’s lives to the world and to the future.
He was very involved in the early days of computer hardware and software in the 60’s and early 70’s. in his later years, he would recall fondly when his company’s mainframe was upgraded from 2K of RAM to 4K!
He earned his degree in English from the University of Washington while working full time to support a family of four. When working for a Seattle bank he was sent to London to create a computerized money trading system for its branch office there. His grateful son went along with him for three months and they both fell head over heels in love with the city.
During the 1970s in Seattle, racial integration became a large issue and Tod decided that he needed to get involved with the school busing initiatives and other community activism regarding improving primary education in his chosen city for all of its citizens. Infused with the ideals of the Civil Rights movement, he worked for racial equality in schools, cultural centers and in local government. He became the chair of the Joint Advisory Committee on Education, where he claimed that he was just the “guy in the banker’s suit” and a palatable spokesperson for the underrepresented groups for whom he worked.
After Leaving Seattle First National Bank, he worked as a project manager for Historic Seattle, bringing the old Home of the Good Shepherd Catholic School up to code and to the city as a beloved cultural and community center for the Wallingford district. He also worked with Bernie Whitebear to create the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center at Discovery Park in Seattle.
In 1978 he ran for the Washington State Senate and while he made a better showing against the incumbent than any had before, he lost. Unfortunately for his home state they would not have his wit and wisdom to guide them in their future legislation.
Later in his career he was a partner in a management consulting firm that specialized in supervisory training, and in retirement he was a beloved volunteer teacher of ESL (English as a Second Language) to many grateful immigrant students of all races and nationalities. He was grateful to the Seattle Public Library for providing a venue for these essential ELS classes.
Tod and Joanne loved to travel, and from the first family overseas trip in 1975, they toured Europe and Asia many times, sampling food, culture, art and history in equal amounts. At 81, Tod finally got to South America, leaving only Australia and Antarctica as untrodden continents. His table was legendary and selection, preparation and presentation of meat was honed to a high art. At a dinner celebrating the new millennium, he produced a turkey stuffed with a goose, stuffed with a capon, stuffed with a pheasant, stuffed with a quail, stuffed with an egg. He vowed to never do anything to foolish ever again.
Tod is survived by his loving family in his daughter Heather, son Chris, brother Tim, grandsons Adrian & Sean, great-grandson Nick, and The Usual Suspects - a large group of family and friends, many who were able to enjoy Thanksgiving and to say goodbye a few days before he passed away. As a friend from Wales rightly said, “there's no way he could leave a room, let alone a life, without being missed.”